Perfidy and the Subtle Mind of Man
You, the devout, won’t know the answers to the many questions I ask. They are for me, you understand. Yet I will recount the story as to how this great institution began, and the questions will linger in your breast. And if fortune serves, they will haunt you, as they have haunted me. The questions are the lanterns that light the path to perfect faith.
*
I: How long has the desolate winter lived in the heart of man?
*
But it wasn’t winter; it was autumn when I became an addict of my own volition. It had been a willful choice, one enacted after days of thought dedicated to that one decision: To be, or not to be, a junkie.
I did it to suppress the persistent function of memory. If only it had worked! But no, it didn’t; the many things that were stacked neatly on the shelf of Horrific Acts clung to the interior of my skull with such tenacity as to make me think I had missed my calling as a brain-dump mercenary.
I wished to no longer recall the defining moment of recognition of evil within myself. It was the one distinction, the one moment of time in all my forty-two years of existence that stood out. Nothing could compare in brightness with a revelation such as that.
The war had changed everything within me. Imagine a tree—symmetrical, branches strong, evenly splayed, blanketed in bright green leaves. The war had taken that beautiful thing and twisted it into a gnarled mass with yellow and black, blighted foliage. The leaves turn and fall, one by one, to the poisoned ground below.
Despite all that, I wasn’t one of those patchwork bums you see on the streets—the type that wants you to know they’re vets. I had a place with a bed, a door that locked, a toilet, a government pension and prescription.
Growing up, I hadn’t been like all the other kids. No TV, rigs, nothing electronic except for a CD player hooked up to an old tube amplifier with these speakers so ancient they had dusty wood grates across the front. Didn’t grow up on shooters and gore. I read books, anything I could lay hands on.
It shocked the hell out of my parents when I told them. I just figured it was another something to experience along the great path of life. A test, to know the man within. They, on the other hand, understood the rhythms of politics, and knew what it meant when I said I had joined the service.
*
I remember rain falling, the kind of light falling out that turns the whole day into liquid blue, makes you think the sky is the sea. Black and silver glass, foliage in the forest of skyscrapers, swallowed the blue light so that an aura of violet somnolence pervaded every corner and crevasse, glowed dully on the skin of the city. Sleepy, but stimulating—almost alien. I wondered if the sun was dying out, like we had been taught in secondary school.
It was negative speculation, but I didn’t care. It was the marrow of my bones and no matter the effort or operation nothing could prise it from my being.
My jaw hurt from earlier in the morning, when I had been holed up in my studio. I had pushed my cot’s thin metal frame over to the tiny square window, fogged with the moisture, and sat with legs crossed, quietly chewing my gum—a stimulant—eyes flickering this way and that rapidly at the people moving about far below on the street.
They were motes and I was their god, their great choreographer. I swept my arm to and fro: I commanded and they moved. I had doped twenty minutes before. Things were right with the world.
After a bit, ten o’ clock maybe, the rain came on full tilt, falling from the sky in thick gray sheets.
Have you ever felt the water need, brother? Well, I felt it then. Stronger than rain and the full moon pulling at my arthritic, porous bones. This is not something you can control. The water screams your name, at the deepest level, the cellular level, demanding recognition and acquiescence from every cubic centimeter of your body.
I had to go out into that rain.
Venture Forth! I whispered to the milky glass—I knew it was a whisper because nobody pounded on the steel walls—but it felt like a scream. My nerves were cranked to full tilt.
I sniffed my hands to make sure I was decent for public display. They reeked of smoke, but that was all. No tell-tale scent of chemical sprouts from the tet. I looked down; in-between my legs lay a yellow and bubbled, water-stained copy of Liebniz’s Monadology. Ashes littered it and the old army sleeping bag I used as blanket and comforter.
I stood up, left the ashes be. Smoking in-doors was strictly illegal, but nobody patrolled those old projects. Mostly old vets anyway, addicts that wouldn’t raise their hand to a gnat—couldn’t stand the guilt of one more death.
Who knows? I thought, staring down in-between my lap. I might need them later.
I could be a fool and blame it on the rain. Blame it on Mother Earth. But that, oh devout, does not fit, will not fit, could never fit, and you know it. Don’t scoff. In the act, in the present, living in the moment, you rarely have time to cogitate over such matters.
And had it not rained that day, I would not have felt the terrible shame that culminated in these papers for Delilah. You understand this, for by now you’ve come to understand the principle of the Action Pendulum. You cannot become your historical self without it.
I put on my stolen flak jacket, popped my vitamin—one pill from Papa Guv, twice a day—dry, and stepped through the portal from my world to the outer world. Into that vastly huge and punishing machine.
All else led forth from there.
*
I stepped from the stoop of my high-rise—a colorful jumble of mismatched and faded freight crates—face up-turned to the rain. It had tapered to a mist, and it laid a gentle veil over my skin.
My body welcomed it; that screaming in my cells calmed to a soothed, contented purr.
I had no aim, no direction, nowhere I wanted to be. These days, a man without a job is a man without a purpose, meaning. He wanders about through his days, much like myself, stinking to high heaven of desperation, caffeine and whatever drugs are ripe for the taking.
Having no left arm, I reached into my right pocket—stuffed with everything I needed since it was a pain to reach around to my left—and pulled smokes and lighter from within. Gripping the filtered end with my lips, I pulled one out, deposited the pack in the pocket, then lit it.
And it was good.
I stepped into the street, filthy sneakers thin and feeble armor against deep, rain-filled potholes. The water had an oily, multi-colored sheen to it. I wove my way through the sea of scooters, blowing smoke up into the sky, watching it commingle with the fog. The light was dim, as always. The rain didn’t help, but it also didn’t change the fact that somewhere high above, the city was getting perpetually taller. I couldn’t help but think that up there existed an entirely different culture, a celebrity society, where people basked in the light and heat of the sun on a daily basis. Where the water wasn’t tainted with oil and fetid waste.
I had no pass, so I didn’t get to see the sun much. Barred from beauty.
“Shame!” I heard someone call. I ignored it, the alias of old, war-torn days, and picked a careful path through the scooter gridlock—tiny motors growling like doused housecats—and on into the small park that lay only a few blocks from my building.
My feet made shallow depressions in the soft earth; muddy water boiled up through the pale yellow-green grass and infiltrated the traitorous footwear. Above, a vast, endless gray awaited my eyes. Cigarette in mouth, I put my only hand over my brow, cupped out all signs of damned arcological erections, the pillars legs of a metal mastodon. It was impossible to do, so I closed my left eye, craned my head back to see.
I navigated my way through lines of overgrown junipers choked with trash, forging deeper into the interior of the park, where you could be relatively safe from violence, one eye fixed on the blanketing grayness above. By the small pond, a bulging aqueous fetus at the park’s center, I flung myself back on the grass, felt the water—the earth was pregnant with it—splash down my neck and back, seep through my clothing.
I pulled the last of the life out of the tobacco then spat it out. Remnants of spittle dribbled down my cheek.
The cigarette was delicious, so I decided to have another.
Fumbling in a pccket of my tattered denim jacket for the lighter, my fingers touched on something that didn’t belong. I pulled out a frayed scrap of paper: a poem I had written when the government still had me on psych coverage. Writing, my therapist had said in her concerned, always-a-model-empath voice, will help you to deal with the realities of:
A) What has transpired in the past, your past, and;
B) The realities of the present as they stood.
Staring into those big baby blues, dilated with some legal tet—quartet, the heavenly molecule—I could almost bring myself to believe her. She was beautiful enough, and even if she was half-dazed with addiction, what made her any different than the rest of us?
If only I could’ve scraped some of those neurons out, clean them, get rid of how the burning bodies looked and smelled—it was the smell of cooking meat in my nostrils, awakening something revoltingly primal, something that said it was time to eat. And you sat there, staring at the charred bodies of your brother man, and thought: Damn, I feel like some good barbecue.
I had twenty-six full notebooks of poetry stacked in consecutive order beneath my bed. (By the time you read this, they will lie moldering in my grave with my body. They are the one thing I will not contribute, no matter the cause. They are mine.)
I closed my eyes and felt the prescription hum through my body, lifting me up on the spiraling draft of the first dose. The infinitesimal raindrops caressed my face, kissed my waiting lips. I sang the poem, as it was meant to be sung:
There once was a way back when
My hopeless and grim children
When a woman’s virtue
Held solid and true
Untouched by the media men.
“Oh, that’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it?” came a soft, kind voice. It wavered like a reed, the voice of a woman pumped full of drugs—my kind of girl.
I craned my head around, saw her, heavenly, glowing in white. She hovered there, back and to the side, maybe five feet, listing from starboard to port.
I propped myself up on my side to get a better look, said: “An homage, to the owners of this here land.”
“Oh?” she asked.
“MNC, major networks conglomerate. They own all this,” I said, but my breath caught somewhere inside, stomach jumping: through the white peasant gown I could see the dark circles of areola and the protruding nubs of hard nipples pressing against the wet material. Her skin was light but her features held a native quality, Inuit, or something similar, with high, slanting cheekbones and a wide, slanting jaw. Her black hair was soaked and hung limply down her back.
“I know you,” I said, talking now just for the sake of keeping her close, nearby.
“Oh? I—”
“You wouldn’t remember me,” I said, quietly, interrupting her. I sat up and turned to face her. “I was wearing a helmet, and a mask.”
I waved the stub of my left arm at her.
“PFC DeRidder. Remember me?” I snorted a self-deprecating laugh.
She nodded hesitantly, then more boldly, sure of herself.
I didn’t know it then, but that was only because she lived in my building. Papa’s Onus was twenty stories of freight crate packed with chopped up half-men.
“Shane’s the first name, in case you forgot. But people with whom I have a loose affiliation call me Shame,” I said, extending my right hand. She took it with both of hers, looked up at me with the wide awestruck eyes of a child. They were big, shaped like almonds, brown speckled with bright green, shards of painted glass.
I moved in closer.
“It’s why I came home. The arm. What’s your name—Anna Marie?” I asked. “I don’t recall. But your face,” I touched her cheek lightly, “I couldn’t forget it.”
“Delilah,” she said. She put her hand softly to my arm. “Stay. There’s some more people coming.” She smiled queerly at me. An awkward thing if there ever was one, but she obviously felt none of that awkwardness. She was at home wherever she went. That is what I felt about her from the very first.
It is the most beautiful thing in the world and I destroyed it.
*
I saw the first speech in the series of something she called The Awakening of Perfect Faith.
Out of the mist, a crowd amassed. They were the destitute, filthy, pock-marked, an army of poor in their customary uniform of tattered rags. Yet a brightness, a buoyancy accompanied them. I stood at the back of the crowd, furthest from the water, perplexed and curious. An anonymous loner among the stinking, fetid crowd, I felt infused with the excitement of all those strangers. I sipped at a violet vial—my own mixed-cocktail of dips and bumps, with a splash of a syrupy hallucinogen—I called it thessiah. The Holy Sadness and Imperfect Happiness.
Corking the rubber stopper with my thumb, the perfect melancholy began to overtake me.
She spoke, and it revealed her power. Gospel Delilah’s strength lay in purity of soul. She was untouchable, an impregnable bastion of holiness in spirit. Every man and woman present looked at her with the eyes of exaltation.
She spoke of history as though it was a virus, a creature that was alive, sitting in our blood, dormant, awaiting the awakening.
“Close your eyes, every one of you. Go ahead, I’ll join you in that place.” Her voice was reassuring and warm, wispy, a soft and tattered blanket you held against your face.
She stood atop the stump of a tree that had been cut at its base. She lowered her arms and I closed my eyes, along with the hundred some odd people, more women than men, that stood there by the pond, entranced.
“Try to feel its presence…can you?” A few murmurs of assent mixed with the rustling underfoot of dry, browned pine needles. “It’s a creature of extraordinary power, and it lives inside all of you. It—is—history. It’s the lives of your brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers. Shake them from their slumber and share in their memories, their lessons. Imagine, as I do, my bloodline before me. Imagine it three hundred years back. Can you see the green valley? Can you feel the warmth of sun on your face?” More than a few groans issued forth from the crowd, including from myself. What I would’ve given to feel the warmth of sunlight on my face again—a month’s worth of creds. The memories from my childhood were dim, getting dimmer as each day mired in addiction passed, but the memories of my days in the sun broke through those low clouds with a fierce, burning brilliance.
“Do you smell the freshness of the grass? Can you put your bare feet in the clean, cold water of the running stream? Can you feel the jaggedness of the large stones and the smoothness of the small ones on the bottoms of your feet, the water lapping at your ankles? Can you imagine then sitting in the sun and eating until you’re full? And there you fall asleep because the silence is overwhelming. No motors, no screaming people, only the twitter of birds and the wind making the leaves and the tall grass talk—but it’s mainly a whisper,” she smiled a knowing smile, “and they have nothing but good things to say to you.”
“You close your eyes, surrounded by warmth, and remind yourself that you’re loved.” She sighed, and it sounded like a waterfall. “I remember this, do you?”
I closed my eyes, and felt not the pervading damp and cold, not the wetness soaking me through and through, but instead the easy warmth and love of that valley.
Tears trickled out from beneath those clamped lids. I remembered.
*
All days are the same. You awake, you arise, you begin the first step of a routine that will eventually lead to the end of that routine.
I had begun to count my days after meeting Delilah. It was now 4 days AD, and I needed to get back to that routine.
I awoke from a dream of massive monarch butterflies like giant warplanes, carrying heavy payloads of neutron bombs, bobbing up and down, happily making their way to some target.
I didn’t move, rather, let the dream swim around in my head until I had a firm grasp on all the details. Then, when I was finally confident I could open my eyes without forgetting a single scrap of the dream, I flipped over on my belly, hooked my arm underneath the bed and brought up the two things I needed in life: drugs and a notebook.
I flipped back over and set the marbled black and white notebook to the side. The drugs were in a little lockbox. I set the cold metal of it on my stomach. A shiver convulsed briefly through me, causing the glass vials trapped inside to roll and clink against one another.
“Wait your turn, fellas,” I murmured soothingly, imagining them impatient to get out and into my bloodstream.
The box was a child’s thing. A cheap contraption with a cheap lock formed of thin metal. Fixed to the front, a plastic dial and keyhole intimidated prospective thieves. Nothing but the best for my chemicals.
Key in hand and the numbered dial already set on 27, I turned the key and up popped the spring-loaded top. It came to rest against its metal haunches, mouth agape and displaying my wares.
Today was a beta day, considering the slight twinge of a headache that lingered in the rear of my skull. I gingerly removed the vial that held clear liquid, with a slight greenish tint, along with one of two syringes and shut the lid, pushed it onto the window sill.
The needle slid into the rubber stopper without resistance, in its own way agreeing with the course of events, that it was only good and right that this was happening, feeling at home in the glass-encased pool of amnesia.
I agreed and shot up.
Staring at the aged, yellow water spots on my ceiling, I lay, still as a corpse, and waited for the float to kick in. Seeing the flood of chemicals surge past the floodgate of my skin and race through my bloodways. It didn’t take long. A moment later and I knew that the fiend, the monster, memory, was dead. I had stabbed it with my needle and flushed it out of my veins, blanched my neurons. I was a chemical knight, syringe in its thin plastic scabbard, come to free the people of all their bad feelings.
*
5 AD and she looked hungry today, gaunt. Away from the park, you could see she was a groundling for sure, with the characteristic pallor that spoke of no contact with the sun. It went beyond whiteness, the skin supported by a deep violet pushing up from below.
Despite all that, she was still beautiful. There was an air of such complete self-possession about her. Like a Gandhi—somebody who knew their place in the world and has never entertained a doubt about it.
I watched her drink the coffee I bought her from across the tilted, seesawing table. She put the cup to those delicate lips, light purple-brown and curved upward at the corners, and sipped the black liquid in long, slow draws. Her dark hair had begun to dry and, in the process, kink up.
She watched me over the rim of the cup, embracing it in both hands.
“You’re looking for something,” she said. Her voice was different in here, in the confines of the shack that posed as a coffee shop. It was bridled, cheapened beneath the jutting chipboard roof, like a fine diamond arrayed against the splotched chest of a whore.
I nodded, speechless. There was a disconcerting intuition to her.
“I can’t give it to you.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the strange sensation that had taken hold of me over the course of the last few days. It was a tingling sort of feeling that invaded my limbs, supported them with a renewed strength. But I noticed it then, noticed how quickly it fled, leaving me limp and morose, an aimless creature.
“Don’t lose heart. I can give you something much better.” She smiled, big square blocks for teeth. They gleamed from out of the squalor and darkness of the ramshackle stand. She took a hand from the foam cup, placed it over mine, stroked the length of my fingers.
A new feeling, one less complex, grew inside of me. Desire, simple, unadulterated and unchanged by the coming-down.
*
She led me by the hand all the way up to the fifth story, inside my own place, and brushed away the ashes from the green bag.
I had been awkward and clumsy, inexperienced save for the occasional pro who took pity on me, agreed to a swap of sex for drugs. I used the one good arm just to hold on to her. She moved like the ocean, rolling back and forth, an inexorable and timeless rhythm to her.
And when it was all over, she had been deluded just enough to believe me. To believe all my lies. Or perhaps they were overtures to belief. After all, despite the tripped-out prophet act, she was bright. Brighter than I. I could only wonder whether she ever saw it coming, or whether it was all planned, if I was her desired tool of dissemination. If so, her decision could not have been more perfect. But with the gift of perfect faith, how else could it have been?
She lay angled toward me and stroked the side of my face, speaking softly in my ear.
“This was how life was meant to be,” she said. The springs below us creaked with the effort at supporting double its typical load.
I turned to her, thrust my face deep in her hair and inhaled.
“You smell like lilacs,” I said, “like home, like childhood.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, it was my mom’s favorite flower.”
She purred, which, after a minute or two, put me on the verge of falling into a vast and dreamless sleep.
“Shane?” she asked.
Drowsing, I managed a grunt. My body was drained.
“Do you feel you have a gift?”
“Do I think I have a gift, or do I think I’m gifted?”
“No—do you feel you have gift.” My addled brain couldn’t distinguish the difference.
“What’s the difference?”
“You’re thinking too hard. Don’t. Just think of yourself. How do you see yourself? Off the top of your head, quickly, tell me what you have a knack for.”
Pretty sure I understood what she was getting at, I said, “Convincing people.”
I opened my eyes, looked at her. She was beautiful, in a rumpled sort of way, black hair mussed and tossed casually about her face.
She smiled, showing too much of her gums. Turning over on her back, she closed her eyes and seemed to nod to herself, head sinking into the stained pillow.
“You have a penchant for beauty and truth, then.”
I sensed a feeling about her, and stupidly mistook it to be a result of the sex. It came in waves off her, radiating like heat from a star, infecting me as well. Best described, it was an ultimate satisfaction.
It was pivotal, momentous, and I seemed drunk with it, drinking it in as it wafted outward from her core. It fed, within me, a beast that had been starved for so long.
The beast awakened from its slumber and went about its business, laying waste to the emotional landscape, feeding off the only food it desired: attention.
We lay in my cot, and from my lips issued forth all the lies I told myself I would keep buttoned up inside.
Whether she believed me or not, it amounted to the same thing. I told her she was the girl I had seen raped by PFC Haverford—of course I was gentle about the wording—and she believed me.
I told myself that if I could make things better for her, to change this one life, then I could reverse all those things that caused my insides to be poisoned.
But those were just lies I told myself. There was only one reason for the lies: they were fodder for the beast.
Ah, the bain of the foolish! We forget that memory’s primary function is to hold on to those things most painful.
Memory serves, but it is no balm. Perhaps it will work for you; an inoculation of words.
I could not see that I was the unhealed. In fact, I could not see past the distance of this day’s ration of lies and drugs. It’s this sight for the future, this understanding of repercussions and the value of love that maintains a gift for truthtelling.
The beast ate attention and shit love and respect, leaving me bereft.
Consider my perfidy.
*
Delilah absolutely prohibited the revivals from growing in size. She said it wasn’t safe yet. In her cryptic fashion it seemed borne of some vague paranoia in her psyche. I couldn’t see, then, that the fear had roots. Roots that stretched their tendrils toward her by the day, and would get hold of her all the more quickly if the revivals grew a whit.
But with each speech, her passion grew and it became more and more difficult for those people not to infect the others around them. She spoke, and the wind went silent, the people ceased their clamoring, the sun shone.
And it was all for her. I saw it happen, I knew the truth of it, yet I remained shallow. I had no faith. I went to every one of those speeches not one day closer to perfect faith, not one step closer to knowing my historic self, but instead as a passenger riding a swollen tide of lust.
It was the thing to undo me. Delilah had twisted me into a knot because she could see within me all the things she needed—the war of self-loathing and love, the intellect, the spirit and the potential for asceticism. It was all within me; she examined me as though I were the simplest of creatures placed on a glass slide beneath a microscope. All she had to do was touch my arm, and she believed. All she had to do was ask a question, and she knew.
That was what perfect faith gave her. That was the gift her historic self gave.
The fog was as pervasive as ever when I went to meet her. There was a sticky fetid quality, a cloying thickness to it that made me think the sewers were near to overflowing again. I covered my mouth and walked on. It had become our habit to meet at the coffee stand just before her speeches and I didn’t want to be late.
I arrived to an empty shop. Sitting on a short tripod of a stool, I waited at the bar, steaming cup of weak joe in my hand, staring stupidly at the posters littering the thin wood paneling of the walls. It was like a posterboard for revolutionaries, people that talked about resistance and did nothing.
Yet one stood out from the rest.
It was Delilah.
The face was slightly different, wider, more heart-shaped with a pointy “V” of a chin, but it was her. No doubt about it. Printed on purple paper, the words stood out in a bold white text.
YOUR WORLD IS BREAKING DOWN
SOON, YOU WILL BEGIN TO LOSE
ALL THE THINGS YOU LOVE
YOU CAN STOP IT; TO HELP, REPORT
888-555-8433
I stood and inspected the flier. It smelled of lilacs.
It was the thing to undo me. I flew into a panic. My heart raced. She was supposed to be there. Where was she? The gathering was about to begin.
I fled that place with a weird turning in my gut. Something was wrong, and I was about to race headlong right into the middle of it.
My head swimming with some awful, nondescript foreboding, I charged through the filthy heart of the city, stomping through oil-slicked puddles. Glaring at people as they approached, I cut through the seediest districts, the ones I tended to avoid.
Night fell, and I fingered that familiar soft pack of cigarettes in my pocket, the soft rustle of plastic on my fingers. My eldest friend. I lit one, and the panic settled a bit. Blurry neon streaked like wet paint on the perpetual gray-sky canvas. Hot pinks and electric blues, XXX and SLOTS and LIQUOR, filled my eyes and I blew gray smoke up through the neon to commingle with the fog.
Diseased whores and flashy pimps in used clothing, glassy-eyed addicts on the stuff that used you more than you it, thieves, murderers, sociopaths, ragged homeless and men in long black coats that looked like they could stop bullets populated my world.
They weren’t the reason I felt like I was about to vomit—although the thick, cloying smell of shit from the sewer grates and the powerful scent of urine from the concrete wasn’t helping. I walked through the sea of cracked humanity unperturbed. They, at least, were a known, something I could quantify.
Deep in my blood—there was nothing logical about it—I felt something wrong with Delilah. We were connected by an invisible cord, an ethereal umbilicus, that told me if she wasn’t in danger, then she was about to be.
I quickened my step, the bright and garish neon giving way to sulfurous lamp-lighting, casting their jaundiced glow on the skin of the thinning crowd of nightwalkers.
Here, the buildings were nicer, fronted with a faux brick façade that held the kind of businesses that didn’t stay open all night. But just like any other place in the fog, thick rods of iron or nanobar, if the merchant could afford it, barred all potential entrances, even windows some seven or eight stories up.
Lighting another cigarette, I came upon the old warehouse. Despite being fifty feet tall, it crouched like a tiny weed next to an arcopillar, the support extending up into the fog, tall enough to be beyond my imagination.
Nobody was posted at the entrance, which wasn’t uncommon. The heavy steel door, painted a light pink that was scratched, rusted and flaked off, shrieked when I pushed it open. I had to lean on it with my shoulder just to gain a foot’s width of clearance.
Sliding in sideways, I felt the urgency in my blood creep up to a fevered pitch. Panicky, I ran. Following the foot tracks in what seemed like ten years worth of dust, I stopped, startled, when I rounded a tall set of shelves at the rear of the building and found myself behind a crowd of a hundred. I hadn’t heard the voices over my own panting. The panic in my brain had drowned out the rest.
People were milling about, talking, the crowd having transformed, from the original gathering, from a ragged, sloppy mess to people with a healthy glow and smiles about their eyes. I felt like an alien among them. I hadn’t progressed; I hadn’t taken that journey. I was still just a lonely and despairing, dirty junky.
I pushed it back, the guilt, the shame, the sense that I was deserving of their disdain, and plunged into the mass of warm bodies.
Frantically, I scanned the faces for Delilah’s. The smiling faces leered at me. Impossible as it seemed, the panic built upon itself, growing into something I had never known, an entity to rival the beast.
Then I saw her, her smile, her hands, stroking a man’s shoulder, moving to his neck, his face. Her eyes touched on mine; the smile remained, long fingers fluttering, reaching to dig into the man’s hair at the back of his neck. Her eyes twinkled, as they always had when she looked at me.
Something inside broke.
My ears registered a wailing, a great plaintive sobbing and then blackness.
*
I grew despondent on my way home and felt that nothing could cure the terrible ache of loss within my breast. The fog and smog were thick, clogging my airways with humid, fouled air. I walked as I always walked when I was coming down: quickly and with my head down, eyes staring at the concrete, avoiding people by the sight of their shoes when they got within range.
My nerve had faltered. We parted ways and I consigned myself to the loneliness I knew now to my infinite fate.
In a surly mood, I went to the nameless bar next to the project crates, a dusty hole that smelled of bleached vomit, with one bare bulb swinging on a wire overhead. They didn’t have taps so the drinks were expensive, but they took government cred and that was all I had.
Gars, a scruffy, wide man with a deeply grooved and pocked face, popped open the can with his greasy fingers, wiped the top with a blue bartowel.
“Slow day,” I said, unwilling to commit to more than a few syllables.
“Heard the news, then?” he asked. There was a look of terrible expectancy in him, an impending sense of guilt. Right then I knew it: he was the carrier of a disease, of some horrible blight of words, which would soon pass through those cracked and blackened teeth and into my ears, infect my brain, change its structure, change the knowledge within that would eventually change me, working from the inside out.
This was the beginning of the chain reaction.
I took the cold, sweating can in my hand, lifted the metal to my lips, downed a large swallow, waited.
“Papa Washington’s cred is down. Forever. Politickers cut em—all of em. Bill signed this morning. Little birdie dropped by not ten minutes ago and sang the whole thing into my good ear, sang a song of sweet extermination for us groundlings.”
My breath caught in my throat. And there it was, the truth laid bare, the cloth pulled aside to reveal the monster lurking beneath.
I looked at the beer in my hand, looked up to Gars. Death lurked in his eyes. I imagine he beheld the same in mine.
“It’s on me,” he said gruffly. “Figure it’s a fine farewell for the both of us.” He violently clanked his can against mine, slopping pale amber liquid on the plywood bar.
Wooden, I stood, directed a tiny nod at Gars, and walked out into the mist once more.
*
First thing I did was check on my stash. I sprinted up the stairwell, threw all three bolts before dropping to both knees beside the cot. I winced in pain as I dropped too quickly, unforgiving steel beneath the thin carpet.
Huffing, I groped beneath it, sweeping my arm back and forth.
Fingers grasped emptiness. I panicked.
“What the fuck!” I screamed. Shaking with fear and fury, I stood and flipped the cot. It banged noisily against the wall, came to rest on its side.
I looked around and everything I had come to know, come to accept as part and parcel of my life, seemed foreign. All the hours I had spent, dust accumulating in the corners as I shed years of opportunity, time, skin.
The splintered green tea-pot that stood on the single-range counter. It hadn’t worked for two years.
The faded pictures of a different me, one with a smile and two arms, waving them about no less.
What was this one-bulb room without my stash?
It was an empty room. The life had fled from this place.
*
I holed up and let the rain come down. It seemed everything was colored violet, like the day I met her. The sunlight no longer sent its piercing arrows down to seek me out. I was unfaithful. I deserved abandonment.
I checked the lockbox once every fifteen minutes, watched with morbid fascination as the levels dropped. My efforts at conservation did absolutely no good; I kept using but didn’t feel any better. The pit in my stomach hadn’t gone anywhere since Gars had infected me two days before.
Everything I really cared about was steadily draining away, disappearing one teaspoon and pill at a time down my throat.
The numbness retook me, the eternal cold of winter settling in my bones. I could hear my joints creak, almost as loudly as the springs below me. The lockbox firmly placed
I stared out the window, recited the ritual that created that man, the one staring back dimly through the filmed crud of the panes. The neutral one.
The little hollow I had come to love meant less and less to me. The solitary electrical range, caked with blackened grease and dried bits of food was a worthless heap. Despite its uselessness, for the last two years I had regarded it with a sense of companionship. We were similar—incapacitated, but endearing.
Now it was just a rusted hulk, and I was the same. A desiccated spirit with a wizened heart.
By order of a ruling in favor of the Humble Order v the Estate of Shane DeRidder, a total of thirty-one notebooks were exhumed 2028 CE, two years after the author’s death. The books are currently on display at the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Religion. The contents have been printed many times over in the ensuing years.
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